4 Sport Scenes in Movies (by People Who Don't Watch Sports)

#2. Twilight Doesn't Understand Baseball

Generally I try to avoid being the type of person who fixates on one piece of garbage in a landfill because everyone already knows it's a landfill so who cares? But when that piece of garbage is, say, a human limb, I feel obliged to comment on it. Twilight is a landfill of a franchise, and even with all its profound and irrevocable problems, watching the baseball scene in the first movie is like stumbling over a severed, limp-wristed hand glimmering in the sunlight.

It's hard to watch the whole thing and not feel like someone, somewhere deserves to be punished for its creation. The scene immediately jumps the rails as soon as the hip-hop vampire playing outfield warms up with some shadowboxing. I don't mean to devalue the importance of warming up before any sort of rigorous physical activity, but dodging fake punches is pretty piss-poor preparation for baseball. Also, and this point seems crucial to the plot of the entire movie, he's immortal. Is pulling a deltoid really a common problem for permanently 18-year-old vampires?

Finally, when they've all presumably done enough air-boxing and pretend bicycling or whatever to get loose, the game starts. The pitcher winds up with a perfect dancer's toe-point, ready to bring the heat, then fires the saddest dawdling fart of a pitch anybody has ever bothered to capture in slow motion. Even 200 years of life isn't enough time to allow this girl the practice necessary to achieve mediocrity.

Ffffffraaapp.

One of the first batters is the head vampire, and for a brief moment, it looks like maybe he knows what he's doing. He crushes the ball into the gap between outfielders, so they both have to try to make a play. It's possible that he, unlike all the other actors, has at least heard a game of baseball on the radio before. But just as quickly as he builds up our expectations, he topples them all to the ground: While the ball is still headed into the stratosphere, he slides.

Not the cool, power kind of slide, the regular feet-first kind.

He slides into some base, any base, it doesn't matter which one. The ball is 3 miles away and still heading in the opposite direction when he dives into the dirt because sliding is just what baseball player do, apparently.

But the real icing on this cake of colossal boners is at 1:57, when the left-handed girl vampire hits the ball so hard that it generates a shockwave in the face of the catcher.

Jesus, get a hair tie or something, you've done this before.

While I'm willing to believe that kind of power wouldn't do anything more to an immortal person than blow her hair back a little, that baseball is just an ordinary baseball. It's not made out of vampires or anything. If she hit it with enough force to create a shockwave, that ball should have exploded, or at the very least, Bella's eardrums would have exploded. In fact, if this scene would have ended with blood gushing down the sides of her face and the vampires rushing her to an ER, I would have forgiven every clumsy baseball inaccuracy, and probably every inaccuracy in the entire franchise.

#1. The Room Doesn't Understand "Having a Catch"

If you've never seen The Room, I can only describe it as life-changingly awful. Tommy Wiseau is the writer, director, producer, and possible burn victim starring as the protagonist.

Just be thankful I didn't screen cap the nude scene.

And while his movie is full of problems, one of the most glaring and persistent is his preconceived notion of America's favorite pastime: playing catch.

Every time the men in the movie need to talk or handle a piece of fragile exposition, they do it while pushing a football through the air at each other. It's not even fair to call what they do throwing because there's absolutely zero effort put into ball orientation or consistency with each pass. Sometimes they throw it sideways, sometimes they just fling it underhand, but every single time that the ball makes it to its intended target feels like a miracle.

It's impossible to go through everything that's wrong in these scenes because they go wrong in every direction all the time. Instead, I'll just leave you with a montage. If you're looking for plot, don't bother. It's easier to just think of this as one 90-minute fever dream in which a bunch of aliens put on human skin suits (except for the one who prefers wearing a hunk of fruit leather and a wig) to recreate a hobby they've only read about in some scorched almanac they found in the remnants of our civilization. Enjoy!